The (impending) Rise of Niche MCP Servers

If you think the gold rush for MCP Servers is going to slow down, I'm not sure I agree.

When I look at the evolution of digital solutions I can’t help but think about how APIs went from being an optional luxury to an absolute necessity.
Initially many platforms didn’t even consider having APIs for things like administrative or analytical functions, but over time that has changed, and now they’re standard - in fact, they’re table-stakes for larger organisations demanding Enterprise-grade software.
I imagine we’ll see a similar shift with MCP servers in the future.

Today MCP servers tend to be pretty broad and generic. They cover the high-demand, wide-audience use cases, but they don’t necessarily dive deep into specific needs or edge cases.
I think what we’ll see after this initial wave of wide-audience MCPs is a secondary explosion of niche, tailored MCPs that focus on those very specific use cases.
This could be driven by a limitation in how many tools or contexts an AI can handle at once, or maybe it’ll come down to how we refine specialization and agent-to-agent protocols.
Either way, I think there’s going to be a fascinating shift toward more specialized, high-value MCPs that deliver exactly what certain users need without overwhelming them.

When I’m thinking about this shift towards niche MCP servers, I’m reflecting on my own experiences.
As an admin, I really want to get a detailed summary of how our AI tools are being adopted across the board within our Organisation.

Personally - technically - I know that there’s an API that can give me that information, and I could likely prompt and coax an AI Agent into using that API to fetch me reports.
I have to do it this way because right now, there’s no MCP server specifically tailored to connect to that API and deliver the exact insights I need, so I have to do that hard work, to get the information I need in the place, time and format that I need it.
Just like APIs made stuff easier to get structured information from a service, that’s what MCPs do. It feels inevitable that someone will solve this problem of making all the “edge case” MCPs available, and once they do, that will become the new basic level of expectation.

This is why I believe we’re going to see more specialized MCP servers emerging.